All the Arts, All the Time

5 colleges whose architecture echoes Harry Potter's Hogwarts

July 20, 2009 | 1:49
pm

A mishmash of Oxford, Cambridge and every liberal arts college east of the Mississippi, Hogwarts of the "Harry Potter" series is a big-budget architectural embodiment of musty academia at its most atmospheric and haunted.

The inherent creepiness of Gothic architecture is a given in the "Harry Potter" movies, but there's also an undercurrent of romanticism at work -- a romanticism for higher education and the monastic pursuit of knowledge. The abundance of stained glass and the high, cathedral ceilings give the secular Hogwarts campus a quasi-religious feel.